How do children construct linguistic color categories?

孩子们如何构建语言颜色类别？

• 批准号: 1535093
• 负责人: David Barner
• 金额: $ 40万
• 依托单位: University of California-San Diego
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2015
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2015-08-01 至 2019-07-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1535093&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: How; do; children; construct; linguistic

When children learn a new word, such as the name for an object, they must then figure out what other objects should receive this same label. This can be an especially challenging problem for color words because different examples of the same color category can vary widely and the exact boundaries of individual color labels are not obvious. For example, once a child learns that blue can refer to the color of the sky, she must also determine whether blueberries, grapes or grass receive the same label. Although the boundaries for what differentiates blue from purple or green seem straightforward to adults, children experience some ambiguity, and different cultures actually employ different color categories with different boundaries. For example, some cultures refer to blue and green things with the same color label. Thus, to learn color terms, children must figure out where blue begins and ends. The current research investigates how children solve this complex problem by examining color word learning in speakers of English and Otji-Herero. Otji-Herero is spoken by the Himba, an ethnic group in rural Namibia, and contains only 5 color terms to cover the same range of colors that English speakers typically label using 11 terms (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, pink, brown, gray, black and white). The research investigates how differences in exposure to visual colors, combined with differently sized and structured color vocabularies, affect how individuals establish color word categories.The project will investigate how learners encode color with language in three parts. First, it will test children's early comprehension using infant-friendly eye-tracking methods to determine the initial assumptions that guide first color word meanings in English-learning children (18-30 months). Second, the project will test longitudinal category change. To do so, the researchers will follow children from the time they produce their first color words until they acquire adult-like meanings for all 11 English basic color terms. Finally, these naturalistic studies of category change will be complemented by studies of experimental categorical change in which researchers introduce new color words to individuals who have divided their color space into 5 (Otji-Herero) or 11 (as in English) words while manipulating the type of visual evidence they receive during training. The researchers will also photograph the learning environments of participants to test how visual experience impacts changes in color word meanings. These photographs will be used to create a valuable online database as a resource for other researchers. Using these visual images as well as existing databases on children's linguistic input, the researchers will construct a computational model of how learners use visual and linguistic information to construct color word meanings.

当孩子们学习一个新单词时，例如对象的名称时，他们必须弄清楚其他对象应该会收到相同的标签。 对于颜色单词来说，这可能是一个特别具有挑战性的问题，因为同一颜色类别的不同示例可能会差异很大，并且单个颜色标签的确切边界并不明显。例如，一旦孩子得知蓝色可以参考天空的颜色，她还必须确定蓝莓，葡萄或草是否会获得相同的标签。尽管与紫色或绿色区分蓝色或绿色的边界似乎直接到成年人，但孩子们经历了一些歧义，而不同的文化实际上采用了不同界限的不同颜色类别。 例如，某些文化是指具有相同颜色标签的蓝色和绿色事物。因此，要学习颜色术语，孩子们必须弄清楚蓝色在哪里开始和结束。当前的研究调查了儿童如何通过在英语和otji-herero的扬声器中检查颜色单词学习来解决这个复杂的问题。 Otji-herero由纳米比亚农村的一个种族群体Himba说，仅包含5个颜色术语，涵盖了英语说话者通常使用11个术语标记的相同颜色范围（红色，橙色，黄色，绿色，绿色，蓝色，蓝色，粉红色，粉红色，棕色，棕色，棕色，灰色，灰色，黑色和白色）。该研究调查了接触视觉色彩的差异如何与不同尺寸和结构化的颜色词汇相结合，影响个人建立颜色词类别的方式。该项目将研究学习者如何用三个部分的语言编码颜色。首先，它将使用对婴儿友好的眼神跟踪方法来测试儿童的早期理解，以确定引导英语学习儿童（18-30个月）的第一个彩色单词含义的初始假设。其次，该项目将测试纵向类别更改。为此，研究人员将关注孩子产生第一个颜色单词的孩子，直到他们获得所有11种英语基本颜色术语的成人含义。最后，这些对类别变化的自然研究将得到实验分类变化的研究，其中研究人员将新的颜色词介绍给将其颜色空间分为5（otji-herero）或11个（如英语）单词的个人，同时操纵他们在训练中获得的视觉证据的类型。研究人员还将拍摄参与者的学习环境，以测试视觉体验如何影响颜色词含义的变化。这些照片将用于创建一个有价值的在线数据库作为其他研究人员的资源。使用这些视觉图像以及有关儿童语言输入的现有数据库，研究人员将构建一个计算模型，学习者如何使用视觉和语言信息来构建颜色词含义。